We’ve long since done the easy stuff, like having insulation blown into the walls, ditching incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent bulbs and then LEDS, and replacing a grossly inefficient air-conditioning unit. (Okay, the A/C forced that upon us by dying in the first hot week of last summer.) Putting solar panels on our roof would make a major difference but at a high upfront cost–and waiting until next year or the year after should yield a further decline in that expense.

Setting up an account there involved a day or two of waiting to have it take over my Dominion account–yes, I had to cough up my username and password first–and then getting confirmation that Arcadia was now managing my account. Since then, it’s been a drama-free experience. My payment was processed as usual from my bank (Arcadia apparently has to pass along Dominion’s credit-card-payment surcharge), and I didn’t get dinged for the bill a second time by Dominion.

The one part that hasn’t worked out so far: While Arcadia has a referral program, neither of the environmentally-minded friends I’ve spammed about it have signed up. So while I’m not spending more to support renewable energy, I may not actually save money on the deal.

The Web pages people share in Twitter can look annoyingly bland and alike in Twitter’s iOS app. If so, it’s not your fault. But turning off the default setting you may have been opted into is your problem.

The issue here seems to be Twitter’s test, as reported by the Guardian in October, in having Twitter open links in Safari’s simplified if not style-starved Reader View. Sometimes, that’s great: The core content of a page snaps into view almost instantly, without the ads that wriggle into view and the junk links that pad out the page.

But in the weeks since I’ve seen this behavior return after I thought I’d opted out of it earlier, I’ve more often wished I could see the page without Apple’s abstraction. When Reader View isn’t making pages look identical, with the same boring fonts, it hides some of their content–Techmeme’s leaderboard lists, for instance, don’t even appear in Reader View.

And if you want advertising-supported sites you like to make a little money off your attention, Reader View is not your friend or theirs: Most ads don’t appear in this perspective.

I’m supposed to disable Reader View for a page by tapping the black rectangle at the left of Safari’s address bar, but too often, that only leads to the page reloading in Reader View seconds later.

You can stop this obnoxiousness, but it’s nowhere obvious. Open Twitter’s app, tap the silhouette icon at the bottom right to bring up your profile, tap the gear icon near the top right, and select “Settings and privacy.” See the heading for “Display and sound,” where you might expect to see a setting governing how pages appear? Ignore it and instead tap “Accessibility.”

Now scroll down–never mind that the disappearing scroll bars in iOS might suggest there’s nothing more to fuss with there. You should now see a slider control labeled “Open links in Reader View”; tap that to end this behavior.

In the interest of sparing you the same aggravation, here’s what you need to do that Apple fails to clarify:

• Open one PDF in Preview, then drag the other PDF from the Finder into that window. Apple’s online help is correct through this step.

• Do not try to save the combined PDF. Do not use the File menu’s “Export as PDF…” command. Both will leave you with a document consisting only of the first PDF.

• Instead, go to the File menu, select “Print…” and then click the downward-facing button next to “PDF” at the lower-left corner. Select “Save as PDF…” and you will have your combined PDF file.

Dear Apple: When I gripe about the state of software quality on the Mac these days, it’s things like this that usually set me off. Here we have a completely unintuitive process in which the correct way to do things sits three clicks deep in the app’s UI–and two clicks further in than the menu options that look like they’d do the job. And I know I’m not the only user irked by it.

If I’m twisting loose chickweed with a weeding fork, it could be February but it shouldn’t be later than April, lest I waste my efforts on plants that have already gone to seed. Pungent deadnettles come about a month later. followed by crabgrass.

And from late spring on, I can expect to see Ailanthus altissima saplings invade the front yard. “Tree of Heaven,” my ass: This invasive, quasi-viral plant grows like a weed, literally stinks, and spreads with zombie-like persistence.

Clawing out one of our worst imports from Asia requires advanced stubbornness. Plucking a shoot out of the lawn is easy but leaves a densely-coiled root that will send more growths aboveground within days.

You have to shove a trowel underneath it, elevate a clump of lawn, then feel through the dirt for that root mass and then tug it loose. Done right, you’re left with a long stretch of subterranean subversive that can no longer make a nuisance of itself.

I want to think I’ve seen results this summer, in the form of patches of lawn that haven’t sprouted new ailanthus shoots in weeks (but do show the collateral damage of bare spots that I’ll have to re-seed in the fall). It may seem like an endless task, but it can’t be as futile as trying to evict our single worst import from across the Pacific, the tiger mosquito. Right?

SHANGHAI–It wasn’t until shortly before I left for CES Asia that I realized showing up here without a WeChat account would mark me as some kind of hick. I’m now about to head home, still bereft of a WeChat account. But I tried!

So I downloaded the Android app, plugged in my Google Voice number–as the work number on my business card, it’s what I ordinarily use without a problem on phone-linked messaging systems.

But what worked in WhatsApp and Signal did not in WeChat. After creating an account and entering the security code texted to my number, I got this error message:

“This WeChat account has been confirmed of suspicious registration in batch or using plugins and is blocked. Continue to use this account by tapping OK and applying for an account unblock.”

Whoops. I tapped through to a “Self-service unblock allowed” screen, tapped its “Read and accept” button. That presented me with CAPTCHA prove-you’re-not-a-robot interface that had me tap the letters in one graphic that matched those in another.

But after going through that, I still couldn’t log in. Instead, the app told me to get another WeChat user to verify my existence on their phone. I’ve now tried that a few times with both U.S.-based and local users, and after each try the app has offered a vague error message about the other person not being eligible to vouch for me.

And thinking about it, it does make sense: I can’t imagine that the Chinese government would look fondly on any communications service that allows people to use a number likely to be untethered from a billable address.

When I get back to the States, I will see if I can’t get WeChat to work with some kind of a burner number still attached to a real account–maybe from a loaner phone. Otherwise, I guess I’ll have to set up WeChat with my “real” phone number. I can’t stay illiterate in this service forever, right?

I opted to keep my verizon.net account, less because I plan to use it anytime soon and more because I had to experience this switchover firsthand after getting so many reader questions about it.

Verdict: fine. AOL’s site asked me to create a new password, choose from one of four preset (and not all that secure) security questions, and add a mobile number, presumably to confirm any strange logins in the future. AOL suggested I might have to wait a few hours for the messages to appear in my new inbox, but all 7,000-plus spam messages and the 50 or so legitimate e-mails accompanying them were waiting for me moments later.

Two weeks later, the single best part of having AOL manage my mail is having a spam filter that works. When I logged in today, I only had four messages waiting in my inbox, all legit, with 33 junk messages tucked away in the spam folder instead of littering my inbox the way they did on Verizon’s mail system.

The downside is a much tackier login experience, since AOL defaults to showing you its clickbait-stuffed “Today on AOL” page. To fix that and go directly to your inbox, click the Options menu at the top right corner of the page below your e-mail address, choose “Mail Settings,” and uncheck “Show me Today on AOL when signing in.” And for a recurring dose of 1990s nostalgia, check “Play ‘You’ve Got Mail’ alert at login if there are new messages.”

I still need to figure out why Verizon’s site thinks I should pay $127.99 for gigabit Fios, well above its advertised new-customer rates. But solving that (and finding a use case for that much speed, versus a measly 50 or 100 Mbps) will have to wait for yet another post.

Badge-scanning duty is typically the last lap around the track for a mobile device before it gets put out to pasture. Or sent to the glue factory. But that usually doesn’t happen until years after its debut; for instance, at SXSW this year, I was amused to see volunteers use 2013-vintage Nexus 7 tablets to scan badges.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the hardware milieu at this conference that’s been making my phone look obsolete. Over the past few months, my 5X has gotten into the embarrassing and annoying habit of locking up randomly. Sometimes the thing snaps out of it on its own; sometimes I have to mash down the power button to force a restart.